Quotes About Exploration

La felicidad está siempre en el siguiente viaje. O más bien: en ese bello país al que nunca fuimos.

I thought I might go to the Cervecería Alemana on Plaza de Santa Ana.

Selalu ada saat ketika kita tidak sempat bertanya kepada sepasang kaki sendiri kenapa tidak mau berhenti sejak mengawali pengembaraan agar kita bisa memandang sekeliling dan bertahan semampu kita untuk tidak melepaskan air mata menjelma sungai tempat berlayar tukang perahu yang mungkin saja bisa memberi tahu kita, Ke san, Saudara, ke sana.

If you are squeamish Don't prod the beach rubble.

Embrace what you don't know, especially in the beginning, because what you don't know can become your greatest asset. It ensures that you will absolutely be doing things different from everybody else.

I had thousands of books in my house and never found anything I wanted to read. I would stare at the shelves of books like a hungry person staring into an open refrigerator and wait for something to speak to me. But nothing ever spoke.

I was watching Iggy Pop videos on Youtube and trying to research miniature horse suicides.

I was someone who questioned. I was someone who probed. I was someone who looked under rocks and peeked into medicine cabinets.

Abel wanted to know all about flesh and how it responded to skin, tongue, velvet, fur, lips. His enthusiasm was contagious. I'd been a good-enough lover before, but Abel inspired my curiosity and my lust. Sex wasn't just better than I'd ever known it could be; it was more interesting. There were tools to explore, sensations to try, tastes and textures to experiment with, states of consciousness to achieve or discard.

You are one of those courageous people who want to dare to live; and to do so believe you have to explore the depths of yourself, undistracted and unprotected by social conventions and norms.

We did all the tourist crap, but I just wanted to sit in a cafe and watch people

To me, reading through old letters and journals is like treasure hunting. Somewhere in those faded, handwritten lines there is a story that has been packed away in a dusty old box for years.

She enjoyed the sights and sounds of the dockside – ports were places of freedom.

Research material can turn up anywhere - in a dusty old letter in an archive, a journal or some old photographs you find in a charity shop.

It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes.

For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.

Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.

We can learn so much looking outside our core field of expertise.

As a historical novelist, there is very little I like more than spending time sorting through boxes of old letters, diaries, maps, trinkets, and baubles.

For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.

I was asked the other day in which era I would choose to live. As a historical novelist, it comes up sometimes. As a woman I'd have to say I'd like to live in the future - I want to see where these centuries of change are leading us.

Muscat is like a mind-altering drug. A stroll in its streets is like getting drunk for the first time

Google maps are one thing but there's no substitute for pounding the beat and I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to break into the back of the houses on Belgrave Place. Once I even for followed by a suspicious householder - I'd been hanging around staring at the exterior of his flat for too long.

As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too.